WHAT'S NEW IN 2009

LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER YEAR HAS COME AND GONE. And more books are being written and published to keep us occupied throughout the new year. Here are the books that I know will be coming our way in 2009. There is the much-awaited second novel by Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World, and a first novel by Yiyun Li after her widely acclaimed first collection of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Keep a lookout for Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a début collection of stories. Booker Prize-winners Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee and Barry Unsworth are back with new novels. Kazuo Ishiguro will be coming out with his first collection of stories in May 2009. And so has Man Booker Prize-shortlisted authors, Hilary Mantel, Caryl Phillips, Colm Tóibín and Sarah Waters, who has a chilling ghost story to tell in her new novel, The Little Stranger. Graham Swift has a new nonfiction, a book about the craft of writing. There are also new novels from Pat Conroy, the author of The Prince of Tides, and Colson Whitehead. There is also a new collection of stories from Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness.

From the perceptive and often piercing author of The Space Between Us and If Today Be Sweet comes an emotionally charged story of life, death, despair, and hope, and the lengths we will go to in the name of love. Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, The Weight of Heaven, not only takes a look at cultural clashes and divides, it also illuminates how we recover from unforgettable loss, how easily good intentions can turn evil, and how far a person will go to build a new world for those he loves. Also worth waiting for is Glen Duncan’s A Day and A Night and A Day, the riveting story of an unlikely terrorist and the lost love who leads him into the near-fatal embrace of his torturer. Duncan is the author of six previous novels, most recently, The Bloodstone Papers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always been a good short-story writer despite her success as a novelist. She has published many of her stories in The New Yorker. It is good to know that she will be coming out with her first collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, in April 2009. I look forward to reading them as a collection.

Novels

1. The Outlander (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Gil Adamson
   
2. In the Kitchen (Transworld/Doubleday, 2009) / Monica Ali
3. Security (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) / Stephen Amidon
4. The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Martin Amis
5. The Crossroads (trans. from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt) (Canongate, 2009) / Niccolò Ammaniti
6. The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Margaret Atwood
7. Map of the Invisible World (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Tash Aw
   
8. Strangers (Fig Tree, 2009) / Anita Brookner
9. The Children’s Book (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / A.S. Byatt
10. Heartland (Tindal Street Press, 2009) / Anthony Cartwright
11. The Bath Fugues (Giramondo, 2009) / Brian Castro
    
12. The Immortals (Picador, 2009) / Amit Chaudhuri
13. Summertime (Harvill Secker, 2009) / J.M. Coetzee
    
14. South of Broad (Nan A. Talese, 2009) / Pat Conroy
15. Once On a Moonless Night [trans. from the French, Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée (2007), by Adriana Hunter] (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Dai Sijie
16. The Great Lover (Sceptre, 2009) / Jill Dawson
17. The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) / Stacey D’Erasmo
18. A Day and a Nights and a Day (Ecco Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009) / Glen Duncan
19. Shannon (Random House, 2009) / Frank Delaney
20. Wanting (first published in Australia in 2008) (Atlantic Monthly, 2009) / Richard Flanagan
21. The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Adam Foulds
22. How to Paint a Dead Man (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Sarah Hall
    
23. The Book of Negroes (Transworld/Doubleday, 2009) / Lawrence Hill
    
24. The Hidden (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Tobias Hill
25. This Is How (Canongate, 2009) / M.J. Hyland
    
26. Nobody Move (Picador, 2009) / Denis Johnson
27. The Immigrant (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Manju Kapur
28. Random (Random House, 2009) / David Malouf
29. Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Hilary Mantel
30. The Glass Room (Little, Brown, 2009) / Simon Mawer
31. The Holy City (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Patrick McCabe
32. The Winter Vault (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Anne Michaels
33. A Gate at the Stairs (Alfred A. Knopf/Faber & Faber, 2009) / Lorrie Moore
34. The Museum of Innocence (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Orhan Pamuk
35. The Song Is You (Random House, 2009) / Arthur Phillips
36. In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker/Random House, 2009) / Caryl Phillips
    
37. Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Jayne Anne Phillips
38. Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) / Richard Powers
39. The Angel’s Game [trans. from the Spanish, El Juego del Ángel (2008), by Lucia Graves] (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Carlos Ruiz Zafón
40. Heliopolis (Harvill Secker, 2009) / James Scudamore
41. Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Kamila Shamsie
42. The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay (Penguin, 2009) / Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
43. The Island at the End of the World (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Sam Taylor
    
44. Brixton Beach (HarperPress, 2009) / Roma Tearne
45. The Escape (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Adam Thirlwell
46. Brooklyn (Viking, 2009) / Colm Tóibín
47. Love and Summer (Viking, 2009) / William Trevor
    
48. Noah’s Compass (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Anne Tyler
    
49. The Weight of Heaven (Harper/HarperCollins, 2009) / Thrity Umrigar
50. Land of Marvels (Hutchinson/Nan A. Talese, 2009) / Barry Unsworth
51. The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009) / Sarah Waters
52. Sag Harbor (Doubleday, 2009) / Colson Whitehead
    
53. A Mad Desire to Dance (trans. from the French by Catherine Temerson) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Elie Wiesel

First Novels

1. Book of Clouds (Grove Press/Black Cat, 2009) / Chloe Aridjis
2. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (Grand Central, 2009) / Tiffany Baker
3. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Orion, 2009) / Alan Bradley
   
4. Solo (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Rana Dasgupta
5. Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009) / Paul Harding
   
6. An Equal Stillness (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Francesca Kay
   
7. The Bird Room (Canongate, 2009) / Chris Killen
   
8. Secret Son (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009) / Laila Lalami
9. The Piano Teacher (Penguin, 2009) / Janice Y.K. Lee
10. The Vagrants (Random House/Fourth Estate, 2009) / Yiyun Li
11. The Kindly Ones [trans. from the French, Les Bienveillantes (2006), by Charlotte Mandell] (Harper Collins U.S./Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Jonathan Littell
12. The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Books, 2009) / Gina Ochsner
13. The Rescue Man (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Anthony Quinn
    
14. The Mayor’s Tongue (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Nathaniel Rich
15. Cutting for Stone (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Abraham Verghese
    

Stories

1. The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
   
2. The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008 (HarperCollins, 2009) / Louise Erdrich
   
3. Don’t Cry (Pantheon, 2009) / Mary Gaitskill
4. An Elegy for Easterly (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Petina Gappah
   
5. Same Place, Same Things (Picador, 2009) / Tim Gautreaux
6. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Kazuo Ishiguro
7. What Becomes (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / A.L. Kennedy
8. The Last Bachelor (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Jay McInerney
9. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2009) / Maile Meloy
10. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton/Bloomsbury, 2009) / Daniyal Mueenuddin
11. Too Much Happiness (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Alice Munro
12. Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Antonya Nelson
13. Truth and Lies (2009) / Darin Strauss
14. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Updike
15. The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009) / Josh Weil
    

Poetry

1. Recipe for Water (Carcanet, 2009) / Gillian Clarke
   
2. Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, 2009) / David Constantine
   
3. What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009 (W.W. Norton, 2009) / Stephen Dunn
4. The Stripped World (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Emma Jones
5. One Secret Thing (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Sharon Olds
   
6. Tales of Freedom (Rider, 2009) / Ben Okri
7. A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Alice Oswald
   
8. Better than God (Picador, 2009) / Peter Porter
   
9. New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Mark Strand
10. Endpoint and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Updike
    

Nonfiction

1. Cheever: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Blake Bailey
2. A Fork in the Road: A Memoir (Harvill Secker, 2009) / André Brink
3. The Last Supper: A Summer In Italy (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Rachel Cusk
4. Snark (Simon & Scuster, 2009) / David Denby
5. The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (Atlantic, 2009) / Margaret Drabble
6. Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Adam Gopnik
7. Closing Time (Viking, 2009) / Joe Queenan
8. Making An Elephant: Writing from Within (Picador, 2009) / Graham Swift